Parents: Beware the coffee table

When you’re a parent with a toddler, it’s common to baby proof the house.

You place breakables, such as those crystal candle sticks from Aunt Emma, on high shelves. You buy special plugs to stick in electrical outlets as well as a gate to install at the top of the stairs.

But what do you do about the coffee table?

If it’s glass, you get rid of it. My husband and I donated a glass side table to Goodwill after our daughter was born, but we held onto our coffee table, made of a soft pine wood with round edges. This can’t cause any harm, we figured.

Later we would find out that the table would cause our daughter more aches, pains, and bruises than anything else in our house.

When she first started walking at a remarkable nine months, she’d pull herself up with the coffee table. She’d let go, take a few steps, and then bang her head on the side of the table.

Turns out that coffee tables are one of the biggest hazards for children in a typical home, according to a recent article in The New York Times.

Do not be fooled. The coffee table means your children harm. And when it attacks, results can be ugly.

Last year, 143,070 children age 5 and younger visited emergency rooms after table accidents, according to estimates from the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission. Coffee tables, in particular, turn up in more than a quarter of the accident reports, in the commission’s sample count.

The safety commission recommends that parents install bumpers on the corners and edges of their tables. Do they work? Who knows? Perhaps style-savvy children can be repelled by things that are ugly and made of foam.

At 15 to 18 inches tall, a coffee table makes an irresistible handhold for a baby who is learning to cruise, the developmental stage that often comes between crawling and walking.

“If you’re not upright holding on to something, you can’t cruise,” said Karen Adolph, a developmental psychologist at New York University and a researcher on infant locomotion. Cruisers tend to be cautious: they won’t move along an object unless it’s continuous and set at the right height.

Once walking starts, typically around 12 months, the circus of pratfalls begins in earnest. “On the first day of walking, a baby will fall once every five steps,” Dr. Adolph said. “After one month, they fall once every 50 steps. After three months, it’s once every 150 steps.”

Are children discouraged by all those tumbles? “Not at all,” she said. “They rarely even cry.”

Inevitably, they grow steadier on their feet. But “kids are always bumping into things,” said Dr. Joan Bregstein, an attending physician in the pediatric emergency department at NewYork-Presbyterian/Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital. Coffee table injuries like cuts and hematomas are routine, and often terrifying.

What sends parents into a panic, at first, is the blood. “They’re very dramatic,” Dr. Bregstein said of facial cuts. “The head has more blood supply than any other part of the body.”

The cuts that come from hitting the edge of a table are typically linear as opposed to stellate, or star-shaped. As such, Dr. Bregstein said: “they come together beautifully. But it’s hard to say if they will lead to a scar.” Scarring is largely a matter of genetics, she added.

This, of course, is the second source of parental anxiety. A child’s facial scar can seem like a mark of Cain, a permanent reminder of mommy or daddy momentarily failing.

My kids never suffered any serious injuries from our coffee table, but The Times goes on to to report a story of a child who knocked out his teeth on a rectangular table.